Riflemen of C Company, First Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles, Upper Gereshk Valley, Helmand Province, September 2007 (from the book under review)

S
ome four decades ago, the TLS sent me a book to review by a young
lecturer at Sandhurst entitled The Face of Battle. It impressed me so
much that I described it as “one of the best half-dozen books on warfare to
have appeared since the Second World War”. I wondered at the time if I had
made a total fool of myself, but I need not have worried. The author, the
late Sir John Keegan, proved to be one of the greatest military historians
of his generation. It would be rash to put my money on such a dark horse
again, but I shall. Emile Simpson’s War From the Ground Up is a
work of such importance that it should be compulsory reading at every level
in the military; from the most recently enlisted cadet to the Chief of the
Defence Staff and, even more important, the members of the National Security
Council who guide him.

Emile Simpson does not presume to show us how to conduct war, but he tells us
how to think about it. He saw service in Afghanistan as a young officer in
the Gurkhas, and his thinking is solidly rooted in that experience. Like
Clausewitz 200 years earlier, Simpson found himself caught up in a campaign
for whose conduct nothing in his training had prepared him; and like
Clausewitz he realized that to understand why this was so he had to analyse
the whole nature of war, from the top down as well as from the ground up.
Afghanistan, he concluded, was only an extreme example of the transformation
that war has undergone during his lifetime; and that itself is due to the
transformation of the societies that fight it.

Emile Simpson does not presume to show us how to conduct war, but he tells us
how to think about it

Clausewitz saw that the limited wars of the eighteenth century on which he had
been brought up had been transformed into the total wars of the Napoleonic
era – and all subsequent eras – not by any change in the nature of weaponry,
but by the enlistment of “the people”; people whose emotions would distort
the rational calculations of governments and the professional expertise of
the military, but could never again be left out of account. Now there has
been a further change. The paradigm (still largely accepted by Clausewitz)
of “bipolar” wars fought between discrete states enjoying the support of
their peoples has now been shattered by globalization. Popular support can
no longer be taken for granted. “The people” are no longer homogeneous and
the enemy is no longer a single entity. Further, “the enemy” is no longer
the only actor to be taken into account. The information revolution means
that every aspect, every incident of the conflict can be instantly broadcast
throughout the world in width and in depth, and received by anyone with
access to the internet; including the men in foxholes fighting it.

All this is common knowledge. It has been treated in dozens of studies based
on the unhappy experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, and has been absorbed
into the teaching of staff colleges on both sides of the Atlantic and
elsewhere. But no one to the best of my knowledge has previously propounded
a theory that explains so clearly the full implications of this
transformation, and provides a guide to strategic thinking for the future.
Simpson follows Clausewitz in seeing war as “a continuation of politics with
an admixture of other means”, but he divides wars into two categories: not
the “total” and “limited” wars of Clausewitzian analysis, but those fought
“to establish military conditions for a political solution” and those that
“directly seek political, as opposed to military, outcomes”. The first are
the traditional bipolar conflicts in which all operations are directed to
defeating the enemy armed forces and compelling his government to accept our
political terms. The second – those in which the British armed forces have
been largely engaged for the past half-century – are those where operations
themselves are intended to create the necessary political conditions,
usually through what are known as counterinsurgency techniques. In the
former, strategy, though still directed to an ultimate political objective,
is largely driven by the operational needs of “bi-polar” warfare which
anyhow come naturally to those engaged in battle. (“For a protagonist to
understand combat as anything other than an intensely polarised
confrontation”, remarks Simpson with splendid understatement, “is very
difficult.”) But in the latter, operations are themselves political tools,
used to undermine the adversary, deprive him of political support and if
possible to convert him. The people firing on you today may be vital
associates tomorrow. But in both, the ultimate object of combat is to convey
a message; and to ensure that the message is understood, one has to
understand the audience for which it is intended.

The ultimate object of combat is to convey a message; and to ensure that the
message is understood, one has to understand the audience for which it is
intended

In traditional “bipolar” war between nation states, the ultimate “audience”
was the enemy population, which was assumed to be united behind their
government and armed forces and therefore only likely to listen to reason
once the latter had been defeated – or clearly would be defeated if they
were brought to battle. In contemporary conflicts the audience is far more
diverse. The adversary is no longer homogeneous, one’s own people may be
puzzled and divided, and a significant element in the audience will be
spread throughout the world.

Under such circumstances a military operation intended to convey a message to
one audience may mean something quite different to another. Simpson shows
how this was so in Afghanistan, where the audience was kaleidoscopic, but
one can see its effect in all contemporary operations. The operations of the
United States and her allies in the Middle East have been intended to convey
to their own peoples and to the international community that they intend to
liberate the indigenous populations from their oppressive regimes and bring
to them the blessings of “freedom” as the West understands it. But to many
on the receiving end (especially those who saw their homes destroyed and
their families slaughtered), and to observers elsewhere in the world, it
appeared as a neo-imperialist attempt to impose Western hegemony. More
recently, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza was intended to show, both to
Hamas and to the Israeli electorate, that the Israeli people would tolerate
no further aggression against their own population; but to others in the
Arab world it has been seen as further evidence that Israel is a cruel and
implacable enemy with whom no peace is possible short of her total
destruction.

None of this is new or surprising. No responsible government now uses armed
force without calculating the global impact of doing so; deciding, that is,
which is “the strategic audience”. But in addressing a strategic audience,
Simpson explains, a “strategic narrative” is all-important. This is a public
explanation of why one is at war at all, and how the military operations are
devised to serve the strategy that will lead to the desired political
outcome. Without such a narrative, no government can command the support of
its people, nor, indeed, ensure effective planning by its armed forces – to
say nothing of gaining the sympathy of “the strategic audience” beyond its
own frontiers. The narrative must not only be persuasive in rational terms.
It also needs drama to appeal to the emotions. Above all, it needs an
ethical foundation. Not only one’s own people, but the wider “strategic
audience” must believe that one is fighting a “good” war. The genius of
Winston Churchill in 1940 was to devise a strategic narrative that not only
inspired his own people, but enlisted the support of the United States:
indeed, most of British military operations in the early years of the war
were planned with an eye on that strategic audience. The great shortcoming
of Hitler’s strategy was his failure to create a strategic narrative that
appealed to anyone apart from his own people – and a rapidly decreasing
number of them.

It is impossible to summarize Emile Simpson’s ideas without distorting them.
His own style is so muscular and aphoristic that he can concentrate complex
arguments into memorable sentences that will have a life of their own. His
familiarity with the work of Aristotle and the history of the English
Reformation enables him to explain the requirements of a strategic narrative
as effectively as his experiences in Afghanistan illuminate his
understanding of the relationship between operational requirements and
political objectives. In short (and here I shall really go overboard) War
From the Ground Up deserves to be seen as a coda to Clausewitz’s On
War. But it has the advantage of being considerably shorter.

Michael Howard’s books include Strategic Deception in the
Second World War, 1992, and A Short History of the First World War,
2002. He is the co-editor and translator of Clausewitz On War, 1976.